The present invention is directed in general to provisioning information services to automobiles, and in particular, to a method for providing location-aware information to automobiles.
Systems that provide traffic information to automobiles exist today. U.S. Pat. No. 6,151,550 to Nakatani discloses a traffic information providing system which can display information of a forward section of an on-road radio transmission/reception device even if there is no oncoming vehicle. Nakatani teaches a system with an on-vehicle radio transmission/reception device that has a moving time calculation device for calculating moving times of traveling sections which are arbitrarily divided, a memory for storing the moving time calculated by the moving time calculation device, and a transmission device for transmitting the moving time; and the on-road radio reception device has a reception device for receiving a moving time from the moving time calculation device, a recognition unit for recognizing a traffic situation from the moving time to form traffic situation data, a data communication device for transmitting/receiving the traffic situation data between the plurality of on-road radio transmission/reception devices, and a display device for displaying the traffic situation data obtained by the data communication device.
Navigational systems such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) were originally designed for military applications. Typically, the GPS employs 24 spacecraft in 20,200 km circular orbits inclined at 55 degrees. These spacecraft are placed in 6 orbit planes with four operational satellites in each plane. GPS receivers use triangulation of the GPS satellites"" navigational signals to determine their location. The satellites provide two different signals that provide different accuracies. Coarse-acquisition (C/A) code is intended for civilian use, and is deliberately degraded. The accuracy using a typical civilian GPS receiver with C/A code is typically about 100 meters. An uncorrupted version, where the precision code (P) is not degraded, is used by the U.S. military. The military version provides an accuracy of about 20 meters. Over the years, degraded versions of this system, called the Standard Positioning Service (SPS), have been used for civilian services such as corporate vehicle fleet tracking, recreational uses and surveying.
Vehicle-tracking systems using GPS are well known. Numerous applications such as accident reporting, and emergency response systems have been designed. But systems that provide or manage geographically related data (geo-related information systems) such as traffic and weather information and management systems that filter and route only relevant information in an audible format to a radio receiver located in a moving automobile have not been designed. Accordingly, there is a need for such a system and method.
The invention is as set out in the independent claims. Particular forms of the invention are as described in the dependent claims. In one embodiment, an automobile equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver and an on-board computer is configured to transmit the automobile""s location and direction of motion to a central server. The central server is configured to identify, based on a user""s identifier or based on an identifier for the automobile, the route taken by the automobile. Thereafter, the central server is configured to obtain location information or geo-related information pertinent to that route taken by the automobile, filter the data according to certain criteria, and then deliver audible version of the filtered data by passing the data through a text-to-speech synthesizer to a radio or an audio receiver located in the automobile in an audible format. A driver in the automobile will be presented with relevant location or geo-related information, thereby enabling a better commute.